The following notes on Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine were written by Dr. David Vanden Bossche, alumnus of the Department of Communications Arts at UW-Madison. A new, restored DCP of the international version of Farewell, My Concubine will screen at the Cinematheque on Saturday, September 14 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By David Vanden Bossche

The winner of the Palme d'Or at 1993’s Cannes Film Festival (an honor it shared with Jane Campion’s The Piano), Farewell, My Concubine is a nearly three-hour epic spanning half a century of Chinese history, but at the same time an intimate story of two men who spend their lives performing at the famous Beijing Opera. This sumptuous visual feast is also the magnum opus in the oeuvre of Chen Kaige, whose own life shows striking parallels with some of the movie’s narrative. Sixteen during the cultural revolution, the young director turned his father, also a film director, over to the revolutionaries. Though father and son later reconciled (the senior Chen oversaw the art direction for Concubine), the guilt of this betrayal would haunt Chen for decades, influencing his honest portrayal of the cultural revolution in the film.

The film’s release history has also been a struggle between competing pressures, namely the Chinese government and its distributor, Miramax. Though the film was banned in China immediately after its release, its win at Cannes spurred international outcry for the Chinese government to back down and let the film back into theaters. Eventually the authorities agreed to release the film after 14 minutes had been cut, including scenes dealing with the Cultural Revolution and homosexuality, with the ending revised to match censorial demands. Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein then picked up Concubine for U.S. and U.K. distribution and also demanded cuts to the film: removing twenty minutes that filled out portions of the relationship between the two men. This is the version that has been widely available, though it was panned by the Cannes jury that awarded the original prize. Eventually, Miramax released the original cut of the film on DVD, and in 2023 Film Movement released a 4K restoration of the uncut original: the first time it’s been seen in U.S. theaters and the version screening at the Cinematheque.

Politics notwithstanding, this is also undeniably Chen’s most accomplished work stylistically; every shot and camera movement in Farewell, My Concubine reflects the refinement and precise execution of the operatic rituals and tableaus that occupy such a central place in the movie’s narrative. The story opens in the 1920s, depicting the brutal training required for little boys to become actors, focusing on Duan and Cheng, both of whom become entwined with their theatrical roles in the film’s titular opera. Duan always incarnates a mythic ruler and Cheng plays - as was the tradition - the female concubine who ends the opera committing suicide in a gesture of love. We witness their long careers throughout several decades, watching the actors rise from poverty to stardom. Fame nevertheless requires them to navigate the sometimes rapidly changing political landscape of China, bringing with it powerful new allies and benefactors of the theatre but also creating new adversaries and often the need to begrudgingly seek out the favors of powerful politicians and military rulers. Undergirding all this is the complicated relationship between the lifelong friends and scene partners (although they often find themselves on opposing sides), a relationship that is tainted by the harsh realities of life but also enriched by the unbreakable bond that comes from incarnating two famous lovers on stage.

Among the story’s most controversial elements in 1993 for Chen Kaige’s Chinese audience and censors were the clear homoerotic implications of the two men’s relationship and the ways their roles begin to blur the lines between performance and real life. The film’s homoerotic undertones are further complicated and reinforced by the presence of a woman who drives a wedge between the two men, a complicated, yet subtle love triangle developing. Gong Li plays the prostitute-turned-muse, Juxian, who becomes a pivotal element in both the strained relationship between the two actors and the negotiation of historic political turmoil. While he has often been seen as a politically critical voice whose work was regularly censored by national authorities, in more recent years and in the leadup to the 2000 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government softened their approach to the director. Similarly, Chen Kaige has agreed in recent decades to direct semi-propaganda films commissioned for the Chinese government andThe Battle at Lake Changjin (2021) became China’s highest-grossing film of all time.

Somehow balancing an expansive view of Chinese history with an intimate character study, Farewell, My Concubine manages to not only work as an intense melodrama, but also as a dark political tale on the messy process of regime change. The movie boldly suggests that the politically empowered, whether on the left or right of the political spectrum, will ultimately turn against art and intellectualism, a message as relevant for the cultural revolution as it is still decades later. However, the film’s ultimate message is of uplift, suggesting that art and expression outlast any political upheaval, no matter how hard those in power attempt to destroy or limit its power to provoke, to reflect, or to stir the human spirit.

These notes on Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. The Grand Budapest Hotel will screen in the second part of our Thank You, David Bordwell series on Friday, August 30 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. The screening will be followed by David Bordwell's video essay discussing Wes Anderson's visual style.

By Josh Martin

“There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity,” muses lobby boy-turned-reclusive hotel proprietor Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham) in the final moments of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Spoken with the “imperceptible air of sadness” that the film’s novelist narrator identifies early in the picture, Zero offers one final remark: “He was one of them.” That faint glimmer in question is Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), the meticulously mannered, quick-witted, and often hysterically profane concierge of the film’s titular establishment. Gustave is many things – a poet, a philanderer, a precise and dutiful manager – but above all, he is a man of decency and honor. At this stage of the film, Zero’s tribute to his friend and mentor is also a lament, a mourning of the loss of a man whose principles and dignity, much like the “enchanted old ruin” he managed, left him at odds with an increasingly violent and desolate age. “His world had vanished long before he ever entered it,” Zero opines, “but he sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” Imbued with that indefatigable grace by Fiennes, Gustave H. is the melancholy center of gravity in Anderson’s crown jewel, a film that remains an indelible creation.

Like many of Anderson’s recent works, which experiment with storytelling structures such as the stage-play-within-a-fictional-TV-show-within-a-film of last year’s Asteroid City, or the anthology of newspaper articles recalled by their scribes in 2021’s The French Dispatch, The Grand Budapest Hotel employs a complicated narrative approach matched by its play with aspect ratios, colors, and other elements of form. The film opens with a young girl visiting a memorial site for an author (Tom Wilkinson), whom we are told is one of the literary gems of the fictional European land of Zubrowka. The girl is carrying a copy of one of the author’s best-known works: The Grand Budapest Hotel. Here, Anderson cuts to the author of the novel in question, who remembers his time in the 1960s as a young man (now played by Jude Law) at the Grand Budapest. It was during this stay that he learned the tale of Mr. Moustafa, who regaled him with the loopy account of how he acquired this property in the 1930s – the story that eventually became the author’s novel. Anderson presents these layers of storytelling and artifice with an impressive clarity throughout, with the metafictional structure unfolding smoothly for the viewer.

The plot of The Grand Budapest Hotel itself is zippy, matched by the rhythmic, playful tempo of Alexandre Desplat’s Oscar-winning score. Anderson revels in his tale’s twists and extreme convolutions – knotty phrases such as “the second copy of the second will” come to make perfect sense in a world divorced from any kind of realism. This sense of play extends to the film’s engagement with various genres, defying a simple classification in favor of a knowing smorgasbord of popular forms. The bildungsroman, the murder mystery, the war film, prison break pictures, even a set piece that echoes slasher movies – all are present in Anderson’s metamorphic work. Yet even as it evolves and shifts beneath the viewer’s feet, the film orbits around Fiennes, whose first collaboration with Anderson (he would later reteam to play a panoply of roles in the director’s 2023 Roald Dahl shorts) brings the scrupulous clerk to life with specificity and vividness. The British thespian demonstrates an instinctual feel for the director’s rat-a-tat dialogue, exemplifying Gustave’s prim-and-proper formality and his deliciously combative sense of superiority (“You wouldn’t know chiaroscuro from chicken giblets”).

Yet in an interview with The Daily Beast, Fiennes describes Gustave as “quite alone,” with his cheeky performance of dutiful service acting as a “persona” to veil his more turbulent emotions. More than just a superlative comic turn, Fiennes imbues in Gustave a tenuous balance between the humorous and the melancholic – a balance that is essential to an understanding of the film’s broader milieu. Despite its tinkering with genre and heightened environments, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a film principally concerned with the looming clouds of war – with the violence and prejudice that emerged at the twilight of one age and the dawn of another, pointedly addressing Zero’s status as an immigrant and the xenophobic sentiments that arose around this fictionalized portrait of World War II.

Such tonal clashes and thematic concerns can be traced back to the source material. In the closing credits, Anderson acknowledges the inspiration of Stefan Zweig, the Austrian author of novels such as Letter from an Unknown Woman who left Europe in the 1930s amid rising antisemitism and fascism. During an interview with Anderson, Zweig biographer George Prochnik describes the film’s “fairy tale dimension” signified by the blend of a “confectionary” style and “black” humor as matching the tenor of Zweig’s own writings. Indeed, The Grand Budapest Hotel is such a feast of candy-colored pastel palettes that one is almost startled by the slow incursion of depravity into its narrative. Hints of unexpected discordance are visible early – Anderson loves sudden non sequiturs and digressions – but as the film progresses, the onslaught of decapitations, dead cats, and severed fingers further disturb the frothy mood.

Anderson is a filmmaker often reduced to a set of recognizable aesthetic idiosyncrasies: symmetrical frames employing what David Bordwell describes as “planimetric style,” visual incongruity, mannered dialogue. As such, the director is often accused of being emotionally distant and socio-politically opaque, a formalist hamstrung by that dastardly label of “style over substance.” Though this contention deserves further scrutiny, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a particularly strong refutation, with Anderson’s style and his themes operating harmoniously in tandem. The affectations and lovingly controlled frames – arranged with as much rigor and purpose as Monsieur Gustave’s hotel – serve as counterpoints to Grand Budapest’s more morose sensibilities, with characters whose stylized mannerisms fail to fully obscure lives marred by tragedy.

An emphasis on Grand Budapest’s solemnity and sociopolitical reflections could, perhaps, dampen an audience’s interest, lest they be subjected to a moody and downbeat experience. However, the pleasures of the film’s form and narrative are so immediate and immense – so evidently delectable for the spectator – that those depths of theme and feeling slowly creep up as the film continues, growing in profundity and capaciousness with each return to Anderson’s world. A decade after its initial critical and financial success, The Grand Budapest Hotel remains beloved in part because it is something of a magic trick, fusing its competing tones, genres, and emotional registers with, to return to Zero’s words, the kind of “marvelous grace” that even Monsieur Gustave would envy.

These notes on Race with the Devil were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A new 4K DCP of Race with the Devil will screen in our "Action Vehicles" series on Friday, July 19 at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. 

By Josh Martin

In Susan A. Compo’s biography of Warren Oates, the iconic star of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), she recalls a bizarre story from the production of Race with the Devil, Jack Starrett’s 1975 genre-bender. With Oates and co-star Peter Fonda eager to appear in “a sure-fire moneymaker,” the former agreed to lead the project — tacking on the additional request of having producers furnish him a new RV. Preparing to shoot the film in the Texas winter, Oates loaded up the vehicle with friends, including pal Harry Dean Stanton, for a series of drives through the southwestern United States. During these drives, Oates and his companions took heavy doses of psychedelic drugs. Soon, they reported experiencing close encounters with extraterrestrial life — encounters witnessed only by those under the influence. In Compo’s account, Oates associate Dean Jones recalls that “they all saw a UFO'' on the drive to San Antonio, though Bob Watkins, another friend, acknowledged that they “were hallucinating to some extent.” This countercultural debauchery may seem irrelevant to the eventual production of a major motion picture, but it is in these conditions — an anxious, drug-addled state, blending genuine fear of the unknown and jovial absurdity — that the equally paranoid and unusual Race with the Devil came to exist.

Starrett’s film features an elevator pitch that practically jumps off the page. Four years after Fonda and Oates first appeared together in The Hired Hand (1971), the former’s directorial debut, the duo reunited for a road movie-turned-horror picture about two motorcyclists who stumble upon Satanic rituals deep in the heart of Texas. If this concept seems ripe for campy thrills and witchy kitsch, the tone that the filmmakers strive for proves more sinister, a mood that is immediately evident from the opening credits. As the camera tilts up on the dividing lane of a dark, empty highway, storm clouds gather ahead, clustered around a lone tree as discordant music sets the atmosphere of unease. The clouds change in color to a bright, blood red, with the space eventually abstracted, enveloping the spectator in this frightening universe.

Despite the early preview of a menacing mood, Race with the Devil more accurately simulates the steady deterioration of a bad trip. Fonda and Oates star as Roger and Frank, respectively, two friends and speed enthusiasts who are taking their first much-needed vacation in a long time: a January jaunt to Aspen for some winter skiing. Roger and Frank are joined by their wives, Alice (Loretta Swit) and Kelly (Lara Parker), as they pack into Roger’s brand spanking-new $36,000 motorhome, equipped with all manner of bells and whistles. The RV enables the kind of independence and solitude that the men are looking for, with Roger exclaiming, “We don’t need anything from anybody! We are self-contained, babe.” But more crucially, the road trip gives Roger and Frank an opportunity to relax, to bond with one another, sharing sentimental remarks over drinks and racing their bikes in the Texas desert. Seemingly in an attempt to push the opening credits sequence out of our minds, the film plays up the tranquility of this escape – the sense of calm that washes over our lead characters.

Stopped for the night in an empty valley, Roger and Frank’s boozy soiree is rudely interrupted when a tree is lit on fire several hundred feet from them. Their interest piqued, the buddies look through a pair of binoculars to see a strange ritual, featuring men chanting and wearing bizarre robes. The tone of the film does not immediately shift, with Starrett teasing the potential for comedic hijinks in this peculiar discovery. Yet as the ritual continues, the film initiates an accelerated editing rhythm, with the montage becoming more pronounced in tandem with the demonic chanting. But this is no hallucination: the frenzied cutting culminates in the sacrificial murder of a young woman, an act of violence that sends Roger and Frank into a full-blown freakout. Spotted by the cult, they find themselves on the run, the good vibes of their vacation thwarted.

Race with the Devil plays on the fears of the post-countercultural moment, on a diffuse sense of paranoia directed at the dark side of peace, drugs, and free love. The sheriff, when informed of the ritual murder, grumbles that a “bunch of hippies moved into the area… stuffed garbage up their nose and into their arm,” thus making the town an uglier place. Though Fonda’s Frank is skeptical that the murder is “hippie”-related, the film draws on this constellation of interrelated cultural pressure points, engulfing post-Manson mania, ritual violence, and Satanic panic.

Equally essential to this concoction of mid-1970s anxiety is a fear of rurality, of what horrors may lurk deep within the forgotten, neglected corners of America’s vast landscape. Race with the Devil concocts a disturbing ambience around the denizens of these small Texas towns, transmitting the unshakable feeling that everyone is in on the plot, out to punish the city folks for their invasion on this territory. Compo notes that the screenplay, written by Lee Frost and Wes Bishop, was “inspired” by John Boorman’s 1971 classic Deliverance, another tale of friends who get a little more than they bargained for with some nefarious locals on their vacation. And while the slasher is not a sub-genre in play here, Race similarly recalls Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), particularly in the dusty spaces and open Texas fields where our horror takes place.

Amid this swirl of influences and cultural concerns, the film had a somewhat tumultuous production, which Compo’s book carefully recounts. Co-screenwriter Frost was the original director, but 20^th Century Fox became weary of the unpredictable Oates, Fonda, and Bishop’s frequent changes to the dialogue, eventually placing Starrett in the director’s chair as a steadying force. After this change, production settled into a groove, resulting in a profitable endeavor. In one famed anecdote, producer Paul Maslansky solicited the work of “Satanists and black magic experts” as extras, providing a purported verisimilitude to the far-fetched picture. 

While writing on Race with the Devil often draws comparisons to Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968) and The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973), the particularities of the cult’s Satanic plot here are functionally irrelevant. What Starrett’s film instead offers is a feeling of suspicion — an uncertainty that builds to a surreal sense of entrapment and terror. In this manner, one feels a stronger kinship between Race with the Devil and the uneasy vibes of films like The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1974) or Messiah of Evil (Huyck and Katz, 1973), especially as Starrett’s picture reaches its climax. Though Maslansky believed that the ending “sucked” and co-star Lara Parker lamented its “meanness,” the unsparing, slow-motion conclusion is the perfect validation of the film’s paranoid logic, with all the distressing incidents and unresolved threads coalescing into a nightmarish series of images. Race with the Devil may have its fun — in its intense chase sequences and its buddy film rhythms — but a feeling of inescapable doom lingers once the credits roll.

This essay on Vanishing Point is by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. A new 4K DCP of Vanishing Point will be screened on Friday, July 12 in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free. Copies of Vanishing Point Forever by Robert M. Rubin will be on sale before and after the screening. To learn more about the book and the movie, listen to a new episode of our Cinematalk Podcast featuring special guest Robert M. Rubin!

By Josh Martin

Kowalski (Barry Newman), the enigmatic protagonist of Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971), is a man of few words. He is stoic and direct, always acting on impulse and instinct. This ethos of simplicity is even reflected in his mononymous title: in a deleted scene with a hitchhiker played by European film star Charlotte Rampling, Kowalski insists that this moniker is his “first, last, and only” name. Suffice to say that Kowalski, who finds himself in an interstate chase with highway patrol officers as he drives from Colorado to California, spends little time explaining the psychological motivations of his actions. Instead, he leaves the mythologizing to Super Soul (Cleavon Little), a blind disc jockey whose program becomes a sort of Greek chorus for the film, narrating Kowalski’s travels by following a police scanner. Through his radio show, the garrulous Super Soul molds the impenetrable Kowalski into a folk legend, a stand-in for the mood of America. Super Soul becomes the voice of Vanishing Point, anointing Kowalski as “the last American hero, to whom speed means freedom of the soul.” “The question is not when he’s gonna stop,” Super Soul wonders aloud, but “who is gonna stop him?”

If this seems rather philosophical for a car chase movie, it all functions harmoniously within Vanishing Point, which is described by cultural critic John Beck “as the apotheosis of the Vietnam-era exploitation/arthouse existentialist road movies produced in the wake of Easy Rider.” Sarafian, who rose in the ranks from industrial films to Hollywood alongside maverick director Robert Altman, indulges in the experimental spirit of the times. Inflected by Michelangelo Antonoini and other European arthouse masters, the film tinkers with temporality, narrative, and ambitious feats of montage, complicating its own straight-forward conceit. With a script written by Cuban novelist Guillermo Infante Cabrera (under the pseudonym Guillermo Cain), the film strives to probe the notion of the American spirit – to shape a portrait of the independent outsider whose resistance to conformity makes him a national icon and source of identification.

Yet far from a singularly intellectual exercise, Vanishing Point uses its sense of formal play to up the ante on its muscular thrills, balancing its competing aims as a State of the Union address and a super-sized stunt showcase. It is this tension – between the melancholic and the thrilling, the thoughtful mood and the high-octane jolts of action – that makes Vanishing Point so distinct. The plot, of course, is simple: late on a Friday night, Kowalski is assigned to deliver a Dodge Challenger to San Francisco. An amphetamine user and a compulsive risk-taker, Kowalski meets his drug dealer prior to the drive and makes a bet that he can complete the drive by 3 PM on Saturday. Such a feat, of course, would require Kowalski to drive extraordinarily fast.

And drive fast he does. In a quote from an interview with Turner Classic Movies that circulated widely upon Sarafian’s passing in 2013, the late director emphasizes his aim to “physicalize speed,” to make this experience palpable for the spectator throughout Vanishing Point. In the film’s initial chase sequence – which commences when Kowalski is spotted speeding by patrol officers – Sarafian initiates a bombardment of aggressive formal techniques. As Kowalski zips through this windy terrain, the camera presents hazy close-ups of the Challenger that soon shift out of focus, drifting into a blur of indistinguishable movement. The scene proceeds almost as a premonition of the style that would later develop in music videos, with electrifying editing rhythms and an underlying soundtrack of sonically aggressive rock music. If “[physicalizing] speed” was the principal goal, this exhilarating exercise is a testament to a job well done.

In the passages between these sensorial vehicular thrills, Vanishing Point emerges as a character study – of a character who refuses to be studied. Despite Kowalski’s reticence to speak and the overall narrative minimalism, the film continually discloses brief glimpses of exposition through elliptical editing, interrupting the flow of action to chronicle his life’s story. Throughout these fragments, the viewer sees the defining moments of Kowalski’s life: a near-fatal crash during a stock car race, his intervention as a cop during the sexual assault of a young woman by a fellow officer, and the death of his lover in a surfing accident. Later, the cops will discover Kowalski’s war history, adding another traumatic experience onto his growing record. With a life immersed in tragedy, Kowalski takes shape as a man more at home weaving through the verdant green trees and dusty desert landscapes of western America than continuing onward in traditional society. Though the film will pivot to a more literal death drive as its speedy journey progresses, Vanishing Point’s signature images of this outsider indulge in stunning natural scenery, prioritizing extreme long shots of Kowalski’s Challenger as a dot on the horizon, a blip on the expansive landscape around him.

In a rite of passage for every future cult classic, initial reviews in the mainstream press were far from kind. The New York Times’ Roger Greenspun derisively framed it as a film that asks the question, “why not make a dumb movie that is nothing but an automobile chase?” Yet half a century later, Vanishing Point remains a cultural touchstone – and an object of great interest to film directors and historians. Recently, Robert M. Rubin published Vanishing Point Forever (FilmDesk Books, 2024), a mammoth, 500-page volume that assembles production documents, marketing materials, and essays from critics such as J. Hoberman, all serving as proof of the idiosyncratic film’s enduring popularity.

The legacy of Vanishing Point extends to a widely discussed association with the work of Quentin Tarantino, who references the film in his 2007 exploitation homage Death Proof. As Tarantino’s quintessentially loquacious characters chat at a Tennessee diner, New Zealand daredevil and stuntwoman Zoe (Zoe Bell) professes her desire to drive a 1970 white Dodge Challenger, with her friend instantly exclaiming “Kowalski!” in return. When another character expresses their unfamiliarity with Vanishing Point, Zoe responds incredulously: “It’s just one of the best American movies ever made!” If it’s not one of the best American movies ever made, it certainly is one of the most American, channeling the spirit of the era and the sublime pleasure of its scenery to craft a portrait of the last American hero, “that last beautiful free soul on the planet.”